WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) –– Conservative Catholic commentator Michael Knowles gave a fiery address Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC), where he commented on marriage and gender issues saying that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”
Knowles spent the first part of his talk decrying the state of political conservatism in America where, in his opinion, conservatives are all too eager to compromise with the left for political reasons.
“Though conservatives have many virtues,” he said, “unfortunately sometimes conservatives lack imagination.”
He went on to say that conservatives “suffer from low expectations – we think the thing we can most hope for is that we halt the left exactly where it is.”
“It sometimes seems as though all that conservatives do is defend the policies that the liberals fought for ten years ago,” he added.
For Knowles, “the clearest example” of what he described “is the battle over transgenderism.”
He quipped that it is as if voters have a choice between the left, who want transgender surgeries for third graders, and conservatives, who think it shouldn’t be allowed till fourth grade.
Knowles made the argument that if transgenderism were true, then in his opinion there would be no basis for stopping young people from seeking surgery for gender confusion. “The problem with transgenderism isn’t that it’s inappropriate, the problem with transgenderism is that it isn’t true.”
“It puts forth a delusional vision of human nature,” he continued.
The Daily Wire host appealed to conservatives to believe “there can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism, it is all or nothing.”
He hammered his message home and added: “There is no meeting halfway between truth and falsehood, between reality and delusion.”
Knowles believes that conservatives began to lose the culture war when they compromised with liberals “when the feminists of the 1970s started burning their bras.”
He said that the initial reaction from conservatives was “that’s crazy,” but that they eventually caved regarding the issue of gender roles, and then drew a new line in the sand.
“Then what happened?” he asked. “They caved. ‘[They said] feminism is fine, but all that sexual revolution stuff, that’s crazy.’”
He went on to say that the same thing happened with the redefinition of marriage and transgenderism.
“Now they [conservatives] are saying ‘that transgenderism stuff is fine, but just don’t trans the kids.’”
Appealing for a conservative victory he brought up the fall of Roe v. Wade and the ousting of abortion as a constitutional right in the U.S.
“There is one issue on which we haven’t caved,” he said. “That would be the issue of life. You want to hear a crazy coincidence? It’s the only issue on which we’ve won.”
“National decline is not inevitable, it is only inevitable if we believe that it is, if we give up.”
He finished his speech with a clarion call to conservatives to defend “real marriage, the kind between a man and a woman,” which he called “the fundamental building block of our society,” and to stand firm in eternal truths “no matter the consequences.”